THE DEATH OF SIGHT BY FIONA CUMMINGS

THE DEATH OF SIGHT

BY FIONA CUMMINGS

For the first four years of my life, my parents fought the medics as they told her I had perfect vision. My Mum knew that was untrue. At the age of four, my world was turned upside down. A diagnosis for my newly admitted eye condition had been revealed. I had what is called Retinitis pigment tosa, RP for short! Well, I won’t bore you with detail of the condition, but shall tell you it is a very cruel disease. I was told and I remember these words as though they have been imprinted in my heart. I could go to bed one night and wake up the next day blind.

 

Twenty years of searching around the globe, dealing with the world’s media on sometimes daily bases, being chased as I played with my friends, as a child, asked questions like

“Fiona, do you want to go blind? Do you like being  blind? Do you wish your Mother would just let you be blind like your friends? And so many more cruel questions.

The truth was, I didn’t know what it was like to be blind. I had friends who were, but until people like the media said so, I really never thought about it? I mean, they were my friends, they were part of me. We lived, in an environment, hidden away from the outside world. The sighted world. A cold calculating kind of life at boarding school.

We were locked away, like freaks. Our school was not long before I went there, called an asylum. The name may have changed, but the harshness of being away from parents and love, was as painful as the previous name on the iron gates.

I visited Italy and France, ending up in Moscow for my sins of facing entering the so called blind world!

I visited the former USSR, for almost the entire time of my young years. Experiencing so much more than I should have done at that age, in fact any age?

I faced some extremely painful and barbaric treatment, I was robbed of my childhood, and not allowed to face blindness or anything to do with equipment for the blind, as I was not blind and never would be?

Hmm. Perhaps not, if I had continued to visit Moscow, but finances were long dried up and I had to make that decision, not to return to the country, where I felt the safest in my life, though had to hide, and deal with the Russian mafia and KGB, I still felt at home there. My best friends were there and I was away from boarding school, and the press. I was in the Russian media, each visit I made there; I had to do interviews which were so obviously scripted, as freedom of speech then, was as rare as a duck on a trampoline?

But the difference was, Russian media were not sharks.

I could see until my Son was a year old. I saw his beauty, his smile, and his eyes looking into mine. A deep connection. Thank my parents so very much for giving me the gift of light, though, because of that light, which no longer exists, I don’t belong in the dark world either.

Accepting my blindness? I have now, but only for the past four years. It took eleven years until I could come to the facts about the death of sight.